


ash and ruin and rot all over

by scornandivory



Category: The Penumbra Podcast
Genre: Changeling AU, Gen, harm to infants, p l e a s e check end notes for a more detailed content warning, sarah steel warning barrage, this is sad i guess? idk man, urban fantasy au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-16
Updated: 2018-11-16
Packaged: 2019-08-24 13:37:55
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,393
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16641180
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scornandivory/pseuds/scornandivory
Summary: i wrote this in like an hour at work and then didnt read back over it, all mistakes are part of my trash aesthetic. do not @ me.read the end for a more detailed content warning, babes, this one gets kinda dark





	ash and ruin and rot all over

**Author's Note:**

> i wrote this in like an hour at work and then didnt read back over it, all mistakes are part of my trash aesthetic. do not @ me.
> 
> read the end for a more detailed content warning, babes, this one gets kinda dark

It has been December 24th for an hour and seven minutes when Sarah Steel’s water breaks. She wakes slowly, thinking—embarrassed, though there is no one around to be embarrassed in front of—that she’s wet herself in the night. The pregnancy hasn’t been easy, and the toll on her body largely hasn’t been a beautiful transition into a glowing third trimester. When she realizes there’s no acrid smell of ammonia pinging at her hair-trigger nausea, a faint line of exasperation runs through her mind.

 

 _I didn’t want a Christmas baby_ , she thinks, summoning the energy to push herself up. _I specifically did not want the cliche of a Christmas baby._

 

She moves out of bed slowly, pausing to remind herself to breathe when a contraction wracks her body, and pulls an old but comforting robe over her stretched, over-sized T-shirt before, grabbing her pre waddling over to the next apartment, banging on the door to wake up the nice piano teacher who lives there. The teacher, opens the door a moment later, eyes caught between panic and the righteous anger of the unjustly woken, and takes on look at Sarah with her hand on her stomach and the inside of her thighs still damp before dashing back inside for her car keys.

 

The ride to the hospital is uncomfortable and the transition into a room is worse, but neither compare to what comes after. Her labor is long and...unpleasant, and at the end, she is exhausted but she has one seven-and-a-half pound perfect baby boy.

 

“Merry Christmas,” jokes the nurse who hands her baby to her. Sarah glares daggers at him and names her son after a Buddhist goddess out of spite.

 

Benzaiten is a bundle of frustration and bad smells and loud noises and joy, joy, joy. Sarah loves him completely, and the night he is brought home from the hospital she falls asleep with one hand on his bassinet, set up next to her bed so she can hear him if he fusses.

 

When she wakes up the next morning, he’s gone. Sarah screams and keeps screaming even as the kind-hearted teacher next door rushes over.

 

“My baby,” she tries to tell her, “my baby is gone.”

 

But the teacher looks in the crib and sees a scared newborn with Benzaiten’s eyes and Benzaiten’s faint wisp of hair and Benzaiten’s perfect nose and doesn’t understand that the thing she is looking at is not Benzaiten. She asks Sarah if she’s okay in that leading way people who have already made up their minds about the answer to do, and Sarah has a moment where she is so incandescently angry with her soft-heart, soft-headed neighbor that she could burn the world with it. She chokes it down instead and says she had a nightmare, leans over the crib and forces herself to coo down at the little monster and stroke its chubby cheek with a trembling finger. The neighbor relaxes slightly and asks Sarah if Sarah wants to stay with her for the night. Sarah politely refuses, says she’ll take a melatonin to sleep easier and that’s all it takes for the teacher to leave. Sarah gets back n bed and stays awake until the morning light breaks through her shutters to roll in gold slats across her face, until she hears the dulled chatter and footsteps and clicking locks of people going to work or school or wherever.  Then, without looking at the thing in her son’s bassinet, she walks over to her front door, unlocks it, and then continues into her kitchen.

 

Sarah can hear the thing crying, hungry, and with a furious snap of her wrist, she turns the radio on and up to drown him out. She sets her stovetop to medium-high and sets out everything to make formula. She goes through the motions by rote—she practiced, in the weeks leading up to Benzaiten’s birth, so she wouldn’t fumble when the time came. It is, at this point, second nature to her. Adding in rat poison isn’t, but she does it so easily it might as well be.

 

She hesitates, for a moment, when she looks back down in the crib. The thing in it smiles back up at her with Ben’s smile, the same love filling Ben’s eyes. But it isn’t—can’t be—her son and Sarah Steel is too smart to play host to a cuckoo’s egg for the Fair Folk. Her hands have long since stopped shaking as she picks the thing that is and is not hers up and places the bottle to his lips, her face a military statue as the changeling latches and begins to drink, as he begins to cough and choke, face scrunching as it attempts to let out an angry wail but only managing a rasping gurgle, coughing out what Sarah for a moment thinks is blood but turns out to be red oval petals that float to the ground. _Your move_ , Sarah thinks furiously at the Folk, _come get him if you want him to live_. She rocks the both of them slowly as she gazes down at the creature in her arms writhing like a worm and doesn’t move until she hears the knock.

 

It’s open she says, not raising her voice. She doesn’t need to, the same way the woman who enters her apartment doesn’t need to use the door.

 

Sarah turns when she feels the presence behind her. They could almost look like cousins, she and this strange woman, if not for her guests pointed ears and golden eyes, or the way red, jagged flowers grew out of her skin. Her breath catches when she sees the bundle in the woman’s arms, knows without seeing what’s in the spider-spun blankets.

 

“Give him back to me,” she croaks, loud in comparison to the slow, unsteady rasps coming from her arms.

 

The woman does so without a word, and Sarah more drops than sets the wheezing thing in her arms on her mattress in her haste to snatch her son back.

 

She gently, so gently, brushes the cloth away from his small face and nearly bursts into tears when he coos up at her. To the side, the woman has walked over to the bed and is leaning over the fae child, but Sarah ignores her in favor of breathing in Benzaiten’s milky smell and jibbering sweet nothings to him. She wouldn’t have paid the woman leaving any mind if she hadn’t looked to the bed and seen the changeling, now breathing evenly and deeply and seemingly asleep.

 

“Wait,” Sarah told the woman as she strode towards the front door. “Take him with you.”

Without turning towards her or breaking stride, the woman said, “no. You did not barter. You asked, and he was given freely. You tested the Folk and won two lives. Rejoice.”

 

“He’s not my son,” Sarah bit out.

 

“Perhaps not, but he is yours,” the woman said as she melted through the door.

 

And so Sarah is left, holding her son and staring down at his slumbering double, unsure what to do.

\---

In the end, she named the changeling Juno and bought another set of bottles and a new bassinet. What else could she do?

\---

And so they grow. Juno takes in Ben’s human exasperation, his temper and his joy. Ben takes in Juno’s inquisitive nature. They revolve, sun and moon. Sarah moves them all to a house so that her children can run in the backyard while she’s at her drafting table, for a little while life is okay. Sarah has a temper, and Sarah has her rules, but for the most part, they’re fine. They all know Juno isn’t human, but it becomes easier to forget that. Sarah slowly sees the two of them less and less as her son and his bitter, thorny shadow and more and more as her two sons. She calls them twins without a second thought, and begins to feel something for Juno she could swear is love. Besides, with everything going on at Northstar, whether or not one of her kids more petal and root than blood and bone becomes the least of her problems.

 

She forgets that Juno is, at his living core, Fair. She forgets, until Juno, too fae to break a deal and too human to know when to refuse one, makes a bargain.

 

 _I will protect your brother from your mother,_ says Jack. _And in return, I want to see her office._

 

And Juno looks at him with strange, fae eyes and agrees. To a four-year-old, this is fair. To Sarah Steel, this is a betrayal.

 

She loses everything so quickly: her home, her job, her love, her mind.

 

Juno and Ben learn to stay quiet, out of sight, and out of reach, They learn how to navigate the streets of Oldtown around their apartments and turn the city into their kingdom. It doesn’t work perfectly, and it doesn’t work all the time, but what else can they do?

 

(“This is all your fault,” Sarah shrieks at Juno one morning, gesturing wildly with an open cereal box. The cereal flies out, some hitting Juno, before clattering to the floor. Juno flinches back, shirt hem twisted in his shaking fists. “This is all your _fault_ ! I _asked_ them to take you back! I told them I didn’t want you!”

 

Later Juno pretends he’s a cartoon superhero and takes a flying leap off a dumpster, a broken bottle on the ground below slicing open his knee. He wails, loud and angry, like it could turn the petals on the ground to blood.)

 

The worst day of Juno’s childhood happens during a run to the grocery store. Sarah is angry because she can’t leave the boys at home—they're too young, and the babysitter is busy—and spends the walk over snapping at them to shut up and stop running around. They’re nearly there when a cackle comes out an alley between a laundromat and a gas station. Sitting on the ground is a russet-haired woman, dark and beautiful, with blood-colored flowers blooming from her skin.

 

“You won’t have the both of them for long, you know,” the woman calls. “You’ll undo it all by your own hand.”

 

“Shut up,” snaps Sarah, not so much as glancing at the woman. She grabs her children’s hands and speeds up, yanking at their arms.

 

“Your child will live, and hate you for it,” the woman promised as they passed, “and you’ll kill the other. Will you finally be at peace then, Sarah Steel?”

 

And Juno, who has lived his life as the other, goes cold.

 

Sarah continues her relentless pace.

 

“I can offer you three warnings and here is the last: you do not know what you think you know, and you will pay for ignoring that.” And then the woman is out of sight. Juno knows, bone-deep, she will not be there when they walk back home.

 

He is quiet for a long time after that, in the store and then at home and then at school. Ben thinks little of a homeless woman yelling from an alleyway and soon forgets. The Sarah who once poisoned a changeling child in a gamble for her blood son would have listened to the woman, but this Sarah is more anger and pain than human and doesn’t give her a second thought. Juno and Juno alone goes to sleep with the sudden, stone-cold certainty that one day his mother will kill him.

 

Except she doesn’t. Juno and Ben grow up, a little crooked but mostly okay, and Sarah shrivels into her hateful self, and Juno doesn’t see the woman for a decade and a half. And then Sarah does the unthinkable.

\---

The second time Juno sees the woman, he’s in a rumpled police uniform with blood drying on his hands. He stumbles into an alleyway to throw up, and when he looks up again she’s standing in front of him.

 

“You were wrong,” he rasps at her.

 

“I’m never wrong,” she says, and at least has the decency to sound sad about it.

 

“She didn’t kill me, she killed the wrong one.” Juno insists. “She killed her son.”

 

“She killed one of her sons, as I said she would,” the woman corrects gently. “And the other one lives, and hates her for it. As I said you would.”

 

“I’m not… Juno begins, his voice cracking.

 

“Aren’t you?” she asks. “She’s your mother. She raised you, weak and human, away from us. You grew up only knowing her as a parent, and she only knows you in the context of you being her child. Whether or not you wanted each other, you claimed each other.”

 

He squeezes his eyes shut and shakes his head. “I don’t want to be part of her,” he says. “I don’t want her to be part of me.” But Juno is a greedy child and swallows down what he is given, weal or woe. He hasn’t learned, yet, how to let go of the things that hurt him. The woman with the russet hair and the red flowers knows this and doesn’t say it. Juno won’t hear it, the way Sarah wouldn’t hear her warnings. So she leaves him to mourn, melting back into her world between one second and the next.

 

Juno Steel, broken hearted and empty of everything but Sarah’s poison and his own hard-earned misery, stands alone in the alley and weeps until the blood on his hands is dry and he has no tears left.

\---

 The third time Juno sees the woman, he is no better for the time that has passed. He has buried his own wounds deep until they calcify at the wretched heart of him and ignores them until new hurts rip them all open again.

 

He has traded an eye for a boy, and the boy for the painful familiarity of his old life. But his old life is no happier, no more worthy because he sacrificed for it. He is still a child, still more wonder and sap than flesh, and he has cannot return home and he cannot go out and make a new one.

 

He sees her and keeps walking. She watches until he rounds a corner, shoulders hunched and head down.

 

She does not go to see him again.

  


**Author's Note:**

> sarah steel warning barrage, including: emotional and physical child abuse and ben's death + the aftermath
> 
> at one point sarah poisons a changeling baby (juno) to try and force the fae to pop back up. it's not super long, but even tho juno lives it is graphic.


End file.
